selinux alternate home root

06 Mar 2015

If you have selinux running and you want to use a home root directory different than /home, you’ll need to make sure you set the correct contexts or else things will be funky, eg. SSH will not work very well.

To fix this is actually pretty simple. You can look at the contexts of /home with ls -Zld /home. It will look something like:

# ls -Zld /home
drwxr-xr-x. 2 system_u:object_r:home_root_t:s0 root root 6 Mar  6 13:16 /home

If you create another directory, like /rhome and you want it to have the same contexts, you can use chcon to set it.

# chcon -u system_u -r object_r -t home_root_t /rhome

And now SSH works! Magic.